I'm also using it for photo editing, I use few scripts that do the same, one is national geographic which does several things like sharpening, contrast, local contrast and shadow recovery all at once, tone mapping and eg iso noise reduction from fxfoundry pack

For white balance I go to gimp's levels and there you can pick white, grey and black points too, there's a tutorial on some blog which explains how to do it precisely but it's a bit longer process.

I love the national geographic script, it's great for those like me with limited gimping experience and can really make simple vacation snapshots look amazing. Also as it's a script I can see exactly what it's doing and learn from that.

You're welcome, I mostly use portra for portraits from that pack, it gives you that old school film tones, just decrease opacity if it looks too much ( I always make copy of layers before I run scripts so I can tone down effects, I think portra just does it's own thing without any user parameters so if you duplicate layer first you can control that)

thanks for the tips, I've been using the gimp for about ten years but only really for basic web design stuff, just starting to get into photography over the past six months or so, the learning curve is mind bending!

Interesting... Never came across National geographic before. Just tried it with the out-of-the-box settings on a difficult photo (dazzling sunshine obliquely behind a building) and it gives a better result than my last manual edit of the photo.

I'm using a Mac, so I'll see if these packages are in MacPorts. Right now I'm running two seperate versions of 2.8, one [via Macports and xorg-server] with pressure sensitivity but no plugins, and one [native build] with plugins but no pressure :P

As others said, the G'MIC plug-in is kind of essential, for color manipulation, denoising, sharpening and other cool stuffs (has more than 400 filters actually!).
I like Mathmap too, for its Droste filter.

For some selections it works well do a series of shift-magic wands (low threshold) along the inside edge of your object.

But fuzzy select tool is messy...and there will probably be gaps and holes inside of your selection. So with this plugin you can go "Select" > "Remove Holes" and all "selection islands" go away and you have one clean contiguous selection blob!

A "no island" option should be a standard option for the gimps fuzzy select tool IMO. Or better yet a quick selection tool like what PS has :)

Vote #2 would be for the batch script. I take can a dir of digital camera pictures and auto-resize/optimize and white-balance to a new dir all in one operation. Very slick :)